I'm an LA-based writer and management consultant. I was an adviser and editor for many years for the father of modern leadership studies, the late USC professor Warren Bennis. And over the past twenty years, I’ve been a chief storyteller for USC, during a time in which Bennis and other leaders helped it skyrocket in global reputation and productivity. I bring a different perspective to leadership--some sober perspective about the realities of being "in charge," along with advice on how to tell great stories that mobilize great communities. I've written for dozens of publications around the world, including the Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor and Japan Times. I serve as a University Fellow at USC’s Center for Public Diplomacy and am a member of the Pacific Council for International Policy. My book Leadership Is Hell (Figueroa Press, 2014) is available on Amazon; all proceeds benefit programs that make college accessible to promising LA urban schoolchildren.

The 5 Keys To Placing Smart Bets On The Future

Everyone's placing bets on the future. The hapless Edsel reminds us that not everyone's good at it. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” This insight’s been attributed in some form to Neils Bohr, Yogi Berra, Samuel Goldwyn and Mark Twain.

No one’s sure who really said it first. So never mind how hard it is to make accurate assessments of the future—it’s tough enough just to sort out the past.

Still, a few principles can guide you in making smart guesses about the future of your business or industry. Here are five major factors to keep in mind while trying to figure out how the landscape will shift:

1. Human being are social creatures.

When experts tell you that new technology will lead to the disappearance of college campuses or psychotherapists or rock concerts, be skeptical.

Lousy futurists of the previous generation assumed that new technologies would obliterate a range of communal and face-to-face activities. They figured that movie theaters and sports stadiums would supposedly empty out, as people would cocoon themselves in their homes.

But as I’ve noted recently, good futurists knew better. They foresaw that technology would exist to connect people rather than to isolate people—and that, despite smartphones and broadband and satellite TV, they’d clamor for a chance to be a part of large, smelly and increasingly priceygatherings of other homo sapiens. This is especially true when it comes to identifying with and defending “our particular tribe” of homo sapiens. It’s in our wiring, and it will be for the next million years or so.

2. Human being are selfish creatures. “Men are moved by two levers only—fear and self interest,” Napoleon said. He may have been exaggerating (or maybe he had an overly male-centric view of things), but he had a point.

Here’s a case study: A few generations ago, many experts believed that automation would lead to bliss. Few people would need to till the soil or reap the harvest, and everyone would have endless hours of leisure time.

But competition and a consumer society have made it so that we’re more frenetically busy than ever, fighting for a bigger slice of the pie than the next person. We suffer information overload, because we’re looking for some bit of data that will allow us to get more than the Joneses.

This would have surprised and disappointed the futurists of the previous generation. But it wouldn’t have surprised Napoleon, even though he lived a much longer time ago. Zero-sum competition is always vicious when humans are involved. We seem to like it that way.

The manner in which we’re both selfish and social manifests in how people continue to try to take care of “their own.” This ranges from them compulsively looking out for their nieces and grandsons to full-blown nepotism in the workplace.

3. Trends are not destiny. A few years ago, I began to argue that, contrary to what experts like Thomas Friedman were saying, the United States wasn’t going to fall behind China, India and the whole herd of emerging economies in Asia and Latin America.

Some experts talked about how China would pass up America’s standard of living if it maintained its current explosive rate of growth. I argued that there was a slim chance that China could keep that rate up. Sure enough, within a few months, a number of economic trends in that nation began to reverse themselves.

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